Salmon and a Sunset

Our Sunday afternoon and evening trip to Seattle finally gave us some time to relax. I've been training to sell appliances at a major player in the dept. store scene. And weekend trips will be harder to come by until after Christmas. We visited the locks and fish ladder at the entry to Lake Washington. It's the only fish ladder where fresh and salt water meet, we are told. The viewing windows shows Chinook and Sockeye salmon swimming upstream.
A trip to the Pike Street Market gained another bouquet of flowers for our counter. The purple and yellow dahlias are great.
Now that the sun is setting earlier in the evening, we waited for dusk. This is not really possible in the summer as the twilight and sunset are both late. Getting home after them is not pleasant. In any event, I finally was able to take some night shots of the city. Turned out pretty good, I'd say.

The park on Queen Anne Hill is on Highland St (or Ave. Or parkway or something). A three block walk to the west gets you to the west side of the hill which gives a nice view of the Olympics, Puget Sound, and some large marinas. The sunset there is also pretty nice.

Go Hike to a Glacier

I should have picked up one of the rocks from this glacier to give to my friend, Dave Allerheiligen for his rock garden. On second thought, he can get one when he visits.
We finally got a chance to hike up the Carbon River to its source, the Carbon Glacier on Mt. Rainier. In altitude, this is the lowest lying glacier in the lower 48 states. I think it is also the longest. It was amazing to watch the end of the glacier, or snout. Lots of small, medium, and large rocks tumbled down from the top or from within the glacier as it melted. One such boulder, much larger than a pickup truck was suspended in the glacier, with about 80 percent sticking out from melting.
Just before we left there, that HUGE (emphasis VERY LARGE) boulder sticking out at about 100 feet above the valley floor came tumbling down the "snout" of the glacier. I have photos of rocks suspended in the glacier that would probably fall out as the glacier melts. After teaching about it and learning about it near the Kettle Morraines of Wisconsin, I now have experienced first hand what that means. Way Kewl! Yesterday's hike was outstanding.
In the photos below, one of the walls of the glacier has some of those rocks highlighted. On the one of the entire glacier "snout" find the huge boulder to the upper right above and to the right of the cave on the right. For perspective, those cave entrances are approximately 30 - 40 feet tall.

More or less waiting

Waiting. The waiting has been frustrating. No word from the textbook company and no mail from the online school has been received. Being unemployed gives you a bit too much time to think about what you aren't doing. There's very little chance to go golfing since there's no bucks with which to do it. So you keep on filling out endless resumes and work applications which are filed in someone's office, never to be seen again until they're purged in six months.
So it's off to part time work. I'll be starting to learn how a large tutoring concern teaches their clients for a couple hours. I will also try to find a morning p/t job to fill in the gaps. I'm trying to be patient and not lose faith.

The thing that is most difficult is not having the gas money to go up to the Olympic penninsula or the coast as often on weekends as we'd like. Fortunately, we can go over to the Nisqually WIldlife Refuge, maintained by the US Wildlife agency. It's admission is part of our Golden Eagle passport, which also gets us into the National Monument Buildings at Mt. St. Helens. It's only $15 more than the National Parks pass. These are the types of taxes that I don't mind paying. I can see my dues at work.

The picture is one of about four Blue Herons that were near the 5 mile walking path.